Thursday, August 18, 2011

Living Local: A Table of Contents

Western society, as we know it, cannot last. It is designed to be consumed and thrown to the refuse. Since this is inevitable, we should choose another path - a way that will last, a way that will not burn out. This would be a resetting of society so that fewer resources are used, so that those resources would be readily reused and current resources would be restored. So that our earth would be nurtured rather than destroyed.

And how would we do this? By living locally and organically. By being in true community.

By living locally and communally, we can fix much of what is wrong with most of our problems: poverty and unemployment, wealth inequity, energy resources, food shortages and disparity of healthy food, water shortages and privatization, toxicity and waste, violence, health and medical attention, homelessness, and so on.

For the next month and beyond, I'd like to open a discussion of what that could look like. An outlining of a vision that I've heard glimpses and whispers of for the last several years, that others have experimented with, that still others are deeply theorizing about. But I would just like to open a dialogue with those who are tired of the system playing as the system and maybe ignite some hearts and minds.

After all, I believe that localization will be the most important movement of the next fifty years.

3 comments:

Here's one example of a localized kingdom type community. http://www.rethinkchurch.org/article/england-wooded-escape-distressed.

I'm totally down but I'm not sure how to get people to buy in. I lived in intentional community for the first three years out of college and I wish I could do it now. We haven't figured how to make that work in our suburban context. Maybe we haven't tried hard enough.